Published in Nature Astronomy 1, 194 (2017).
https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.08069v1

For a PDF version of the article, click here.

ON THE TWO MAIN CLASSES OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI

Paolo Padovani


European Southern Observatory, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 2, D-85748 Garching bei München, Germany


Abstract: Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are traditionally divided empirically into two main classes: “radio-loud” and “radio-quiet” sources. These labels, which are more than fifty years old, are obsolete, misleading, and wrong. I argue that AGN should be classified based on a fundamentally physical rather than just an observational difference, namely the presence (or lack) of strong relativistic jets, and that we should use the terms “jetted” and “non-jetted” AGN instead.


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